IAN SUTHERLAND tells the story of the Shieldhall industrial complex
between Govan and Renfrew, an enlightened and highly successful Scottish
experiment in manufacturing for the needs of the ordinary citizen.
GIVEN aspects of its ownership history, Shieldhall estate -- on the
banks of the Clyde, halfway between Govan and Renfrew -- was an
appropriate site for a radical enterprise. The original Shield Hall
itself, once a stately patrician mansion, complete with conservat-
ories, vineries, and extensive stables (from which the quality rode to
hounds), was the home of the Oswald family -- ex-Orcadian entrepreneurs
in the tobacco and wine trades. A scion, James Oswald, a
mid-nineteenth-century Glasgow MP, dabbled in Irish Republicanism and
vociferously opposed the slave trade.
William Maxwell was once also described as a man ''full of democratic
sentiments'' -- and he had appropriate plans for James Oswald's country
seat. Maxwell was a douce Edinburgh Protestant working man who might
have had his reservations about Irish Republicanism. But the elimination
of slavery -- in all its forms -- was a cause dear to his heart.
Described by an early co-operative writer as ''an ardent union man,''
William Maxwell, an activist in Edinburgh's burgeoning St Cuthbert's
Co-operative Society, was elected chairman of the Scottish Co-operative
Wholesale Society in 1881. Things were looking good for the SCWS,
founded only 13 years before. The Edinburgh democrat was taking the helm
of an even older tradition.
The weavers of Fenwick had practised co-operative trading (mostly in
oatmeal) as early as 1769. Govan's Victualling Society was founded in
1777. Bridgeton followed suit in 1800. The record suggests there were
more than 300 embryo co-operative societies by 1830. Robert Owen's
pioneering work at New Lanark was already a legend when Maxwell took
over the SCWS.
In 1864, in Glasgow's Bell Hotel, a conference was summond ''to
consider the necessity of establishing a wholesale depot or agency in
Glasgow for the purpose of supplying Co-operative societies in the West
of Scotland and elsewhere with pure groceries and provisions from the
best markets.'' Co-operators were much exercised by food adulteration
and subsequent meetings thundered against ''speculators in food.''
The rules of the new SCWS -- proclaiming co-operation's intention to
enter every trade except the liquor business -- were finally registered
in May 1868.
The Oswalds and Robert Owen's inheritors crossed paths long before
William Maxwell's shrewd eye fell on the family's 116 acres out past
Govan. In September 1868, the SCWS set up shop in the long-vanished
Madeira Court, off Argyle Street -- once the city residence of the
tobacco dynasty. Co-operation's teetotallers seem to have found no irony
in establishing their roots in a location named from the Oswald's
flourishing wine trade.
By 1873, ''intense interest'' was reported in the possibilities of
co-operative production north of the Border. Even the prospect of
co-operative shipbuilding was being investigated. Most of the
enterprises that did emerge -- like the ill-fated Glasgow co-operative
ironworks -- were responses to crisis (factory closedowns, lock-outs, or
strikes). They didn't last the course. The SCWS, avoiding the Demon
Drink and foaming at the mouth against food adulteration and real (or
imagined) retail and wholesale cartels, went marching on.
Even by 1878, the SCWS directorate had dabbled in semi-manufacture for
their clothing trade. They talked of founding a co-operative flour mill
and a sugar refinery. Their flourishing drapery department was
increasingly unhappy about the quality of items being received from
their private sector shirt manufacturer. SCWS buyer James Leggat -- an
ardent co-operator from boyhood -- is supposed to have turned to his
department head David Gardener and asked: ''Could we not make these
shirts ourselves?''
William Maxwell backed the idea immediately. The SCWS had started down
the road that would lead to Shield Hall becoming Shieldhall -- and the
site of one of Scotland's greatest industrial and social triumphs. James
Leggat's chance remark, born of frustration, effectively gave birth to
what Maxwell once termed ''this gigantic business.''
By 1882, the SCWS had entered the upholstery business. By 1884, they
had begun furniture manufacture. A boot department started up in the
SCWS's Wallace Street premises in 1885 -- destined to be one of the
''Co's'' enduring successes, producing #47,620 worth of proletarian
footwear in its first year. Hosiery production followed at Morrison
Street in 1886 -- millinery the following year. ''Co-operative Alley''
around Paisley Road was soon bursting at the seams. The search for
central premises was begun.
COMPLAINED LOUDLY
William Maxwell had been to the United States -- where they thought
big. He took in the lesson. When the Shield Hall estate came on the
market, he grabbed a large chunk of it -- at the (even then) high price
of #500 an acre. Maxwell paid up -- but complained loudly.
Co-operation's man of vision lived to regret an initial part-purchase of
the Oswald patrimony.
Maxwell's dream seems to have been a combination of Clydebank's Singer
works -- symbolising industrial might and efficiency -- with latter-day
Owenism. The new Shieldhall -- very much a suburb in 1887 when Maxwell
cut the first sod -- was to be a miniature garden city: works in the
centre, surrounded by model artisan housing. In the even, only the
industry actually arrived.
Building -- largely in the French Renaissance style -- proceeded
rapidly. By the summer of 1888, while the nation flocked to the Glasgow
International Exhibition, the Shieldhall complex was in full swing. At
the exhibition, early products of the Shieldhall furniture works were
receiving the first numerous public and professional plaudits. Maxwell
saw to it that Shieldhall's furniture makers were ''not harried and
harassed,'' as they painstakingly turned out their award-winning works.
Conventional private enterprise was accused, via abundant SCWS
propaganda, of offering for sale chairs stuffed with straw and old
newspapers. Then as now, cheap furniture could be lethal.
Private traders throughout Scotland reacted to the new Shieldhall and
its quality products. ''Committees for the Defence of Trade'' sprang up
-- issuing semi-paranoid propaganda, claiming the SCWS to be everything
from the agents of a foreign power to the recipients of secret subsidies
from God knows where. Much of it was undoubtedly desperate stuff -- and
in some instances, thoroughly libellous.
Maxwell had his cohorts retaliate by satirising their opponents --
secure in the knowledge that, as fast as Shieldhall turned high-quality
goods out, the canny Scots shopper, caring not one tuppeny damn whether
the SCWS and its Shieldhall cornucopia were covert revolutionaries or a
Judeo-Masonic plot -- snapped them up and pocketed the handsome
dividend.
Shieldhall's builders kept up an incessant barrage of statistics --
both silencing and further infuriating their enraged critics. In 1914,
Shieldhall turned out 2409 tables, 2162 kitchen tables, 670 bookcases,
596 hallstands, 757 chiffoniers, 1358 sets of drawers, 274 bedsteads,
751 wardrobes, 366 dressers, 7162 kitchen chairs, 3985 easy chairs, and
1180 dining-room suits. All of it was highly profitable -- and produced
by union labour earning union wages.
Printing began at Shieldhall in 1889. By 1903, the department had a
full staff of renowned commercial artists. The department was the first
in Scotland to use the rotary off-set lithograph machine.
PRODUCTION LINES
Kipling's footweary musical tribute to the Second Ashanti War might
have been specially written for Shieldhall. Boots, boots, and more boots
came off the production lines from 1888 onwards. By 1918, the SCWS had
sold more than 21!/;1/ million pairs of boots and shoes. The largest
footwear producer in Scotland, Shieldhall consumed 80,000 goatskins,
200,000 hides, and 300 tons of sole leather a year. From the original
shirt shop (and the SCWS was able to tell a 1912 parliamentary committee
on sweated trades that they paid an average of 25% higher wages than the
traditional ''putting out'' system of shirt-making), clothing production
grew to encompass artisan clothing, bespoke tailoring, off the peg
tailoring, underclothing, waterproofs, and hosiery.
The artisan clothing included serge jackets, moleskin trousers, and
what were exotically advertised as ''dongarees.'' Generations of kids
went to school in Shieldhall blazers. The police patrolled tenement
streets in Shieldhall blue. Fishermen from Berwick to Shetland put to
sea in legendary SCWS ''waterproof socks.''
Jam -- and lots of it -- was a Shieldhall staple from 1890. Co-op
activists, perhaps not entirely seriously, liked to claim that musical-
hall jokes about the co-operative jam empire having ''branches
everywhere'' were plants by the militant Trade Defence vigilantes.
Sweets followed in 1891, coffee essence in 1892, and pickles in 1893.
Shieldhall's fruit buyers were notoriously fussy. The news that the
man from Shieldhall had said ''yes'' must have brought a sigh of relief
from many a hard-pressed Blairgowrie berry farmer. Only Shieldhall's
vast fruit boilers could offer the consumer nine different types of
marmalade. In similar vein, ''Co'' sauce might not have boasted a label
in schoolboy French, but the parliamentary variety couldn't really get
across the Border until that fatal day when Scottish co-operation went
weak at the knees.
Scots greased their scalps with Shieldhall hair ''paraffin,'' soothed
their weans with Shieldhall baby powder, and brushed their teeth with
Shieldhall tooth talc. Shieldhall even made its own perfumes. The pomade
produced was of such quality as to be exported to the world's perfume
manufacturers.
Upwards of 8000 visitors came annually to tour the works. Nowhere in
the world were so many industrial processes carried on under one roof.
The chief guide, appropriately, was a Mr Cook.
Shieldhall produced everything from art silk stockings through cod
liver oil and garden sheds to -- on one glorious occasion -- 9000 pairs
of knickers for the Indian Army.
In both European wars, Shieldhall rose to the occasion. Although the
international co-operative movement valiantly struggled for peace before
1914 and 1939, there was no hesitation when the armies rolled. Even at
that, social responsibility was always to the fore.
When the master bakers of Glasgow tried to increase prices only a few
days before August 1914, they were thwarted by co-operative enterprise
-- upping bread production and maintaining original prices.
Shieldhall supplied boots to the French and Russian armies in the
Great War -- whether the latter had snow on them is not recorded. While
butchers openly sold horseflesh after 1914, the SCWS refused to do so.
Shieldhall cigarettes ''comforted'' the men in the trenches.
William Maxwell was knighted at Buckingham Palace in August 1919.
In the Second World War, when a German prisoner wrote home via the Red
Cross, the official postcard was printed at Shieldhall. If armies march
on both their boots and their stomachs, Shieldhall's output was a major
contribution to victory -- 607,500 pairs of boots were produced, along
with 3,024,000 tea tablets for use in commando raids and sundry
invasions. SCWS's green fruit and egg department were the official
suppliers of pigeon food to the RAF/War Department Pigeon Service. Wings
for Victory, indeed.
FURNITURE CRAFTSMEN
Shieldhall's furniture craftsmen made floats for river crossings,
Naafi chairs, and 50,000 bunks for Anderson shelters. When demob
arrived, thousands of Scots returned to civvy life in Shieldhall suits.
A little bit of Shieldhall actually went to war. In May, 1940, the
coaster Scottish Co-operator lifted hungry and weary men from the
beaches of Boulogne and Dunkirk, often under heavy shell-fire. She then
attempted to sail for St Valery, intent on rescuing the ill-fated 51st
Highland Division -- but was ordered to return to Spithead. Her crew
were discharged as suffering from nervous exhaustion.
Shieldhall was a working-class life-support system. Above all, its
founders were dedicated to Scotland. Its products used local labour,
local ingredients, and enhanced local technology. Throughout its heyday,
SCWS activists exhorted Scotland's myriad independent co-operative
societies to use exclusively the native products. To judge by the record
of repeated pleas and accusations, they were far from always successful.
Local societies were virtually obsessed with their commercial and
geographical independence. Private sector competitors made central
decisions and carried them through. In the 1920s, Scottish co-operation
had the chance to copy America again, and pioneer a new revolutionary
concept called self-service. The moment wasn't seized.
William Maxwell retired to Rothesay, where he took over the presidency
of the small local society. Had Shieldhall's founder lived to see the
ignominious collapse of Scottish co-operation in the 1970s, he would
have been broken-hearted.
But Shieldhall didn't totally pop its clogs. The Manchester-based CWS
retains a presence north of the border -- and promises expansion.
Co-operation was a response to crisis. In deprived areas, people are
banding together to form food co-ops, trading in basics. They may never
have heard of the Fenwick weavers, but they're treading the same road.
The CWS are actually offering shoppers at the shiny new supermarkets
the prospect of membership. Down south, one or two enterprising
societies have discovered a revolutionary new device to boost interest
and sales. It's called a dividend.
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